Welcome back to The Mining Pod! Max Guise, a team member from Block’s Proto division, joins to talk about the company’s new ASIC chip. A veteran of Block, Guise has worked on everything from the Proto mining ASIC, to Square’s point-of-sale, and its hardware wallet Bitkey. During the discussion, Guise gives us a brief history of Proto’s origins, discusses the challenges of designing (and manufacturing and marketing!) a bitcoin mining ASIC, provides a timeline for the Proto ASIC rollout, and even graces us with a demo of the chip!

Timestamps:

00:00 Start

03:21 Max bio

03:56 Working at Square & CashApp

04:58 Building the point of sale product

06:20 Building hardware

09:48 Genesis of Proto

12:33 Open development

13:37 The team

14:59 What is Proto

16:59 Selling chips

19:56 Closed sourced firmware

21:38 Lifecycle examination

23:32 Market strategy

24:33 Financing

25:05 Hashrate as payment

26:16 Deployment

28:29 When new rig?

28:59 Ecosystem of products

30:13 Other components

30:58 Working with competing miners

Published twice weekly, "The Mining Pod" interviews the best builders and operators in the Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining landscape. Subscribe to get notifications when we publish interviews on Tuesday and a news show on Friday! 

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"The Mining Pod" is produced by Sunnyside Honey Inc. with Senior Producer Damien Somerset.

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